


Badass Women Who Take No Shit or Cleaning as a Coping Mechanism

by queenofchildren



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Mutual Pining, Mutual Stupidity, Neighbours, almost a song fic, anguished declaration of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 04:30:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19310662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofchildren/pseuds/queenofchildren
Summary: In which Brienne has a bit of a shit day, does some therapeutic dance-cleaning, and learns some interesting things about her neighbour and third-best friend Jaime.





	Badass Women Who Take No Shit or Cleaning as a Coping Mechanism

**Author's Note:**

> This started out heavily inspired by Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy" and then ended up having next to nothing to do with it, so do what you want with that.  
> Also, possibly Content Warning for Brienne's constant negative thoughts about herself.

Brienne considers herself a boring person, for the most part. She doesn't have a super exciting job, or a ton of friends, or the money to jet off around the world to discover the secrets of some faraway place. And she's fine with all of that, and especially with the fact that there's nothing about her that would draw any attention – nothing except her appearance; limbs too long and shoulders too broad and a face that looks like it was composed out of spare parts, disregarding every aesthetic rule.

And perhaps that appearance, and all the attention it gets her, is exactly why she prefers to live a quiet life, to stick to the sidelines in group photos and during crowded events. Sure, sometimes she wishes things were different: That she'd march up to the middle of the room and have everyone's attention because of something else, something she has control over – the way she laughs, perhaps, head thrown back and long neck exposed to make desire flare up in men the way Margaery knows how to do; or a captivatingly spun tale that has everyone in stitches, Tyrion's specialty.

But Brienne has no such talents, and she's quite content to say or do absolutely nothing that would draw anyone's attention even more than her 6-feet-plus frame already does. But sometimes, alone in her apartment, she feels like all that quiet inobtrusiveness is strangling the life out of her, and she needs to do something to claim all the space that she usually tries so hard not to take up.

That's when she dances.

It's her deepest, darkest secret, and that probably says a lot about just how boring she is too. But dancing in public would draw so much attention that she usually sticks to the sides of dance floors and contends herself with sipping her drink of choice, rocking along on the balls of her feet and glaring at anyone who's bothering her friends. But in the privacy of her apartment, she dances the way she wishes she could during those occasions, twirling and jumping and shimmying her hips in a way that would be alluring if she had hips to speak of. Still, the movement alone feels... perhaps not sexy, but sensual at least, so different from her usual long strides and controlled movements, working her muscles in an entirely different way than her daily workout does.

It feels almost sinful to exist like that, parallel to the way the world sees her – a woman with a body that's not just for athletic activity and protecting her friends and lifting heavy stuff, but for other things as well; joyful, beautiful, frivolous things.

Today is a dancing day for multiple reasons: For one thing, Brienne's been putting off cleaning her apartment for weeks, and she's found that particular task to be much more pleasant when combined with loud music and a few of the moves she taught herself from youtube-videos. For another, she had an unpleasant run-in with a former... well, not really admirer, as she found out, and the blast from her past seems to have unmoored her, somehow. The memories the encounter brought up are far from pleasant: Memories of a surprising but not unwelcome amount of attention during her senior year, a date with a nice enough boy, and then the revelation of a bet, jeers and sneers and a rose thrown at her feet...

She's forbidden herself to let it make her sad – they don't deserve to have this much power over her all these years later. But there's been anger bubbling around inside her all day, boiling just under her skin, and even a rigorous workout was not enough to drive it out entirely. So, still in her workout ensemble of running shorts and a sports bra, she decided to tackle the long-overdue task of cleaning her bathroom while she's already sweaty and amped-up.

The music she chooses is from a playlist Sansa compiled after her last break-up, entitled “Badass Women Who Take No Shit”, because that's what Brienne wishes she was, especially on days like today, when she only nodded politely at Hyle's inane smalltalk, instead of asking him why he thinks he has any right to talk to her at all and then knocking him on his ass.

The first few songs on the list were exactly what she needed to blow off steam, fast and loud _riot grrrl_ anthems composed entirely of brutal guitars and rebellious women screaming their rage out into the world. After a few of those, the playlist gradually mellowed out along with Brienne's anger, and the song she has on now is poppy and upbeat, but there's a dark undercurrent running through the bass that suits her mood perfectly, and a singer who sounds like she's exactly the kind of woman Brienne wishes she was – ruthless and implacable and just a little mischievous.

Brienne sings along to this one, imagining what it would be like to be this way; confident enough to stand in front of a man and taunt him with his weaknesses and know he'd still want her more than he's ever wanted anyone else.

“ _I'm the bad guy..._ “, she growls the lyrics as she scrubs the sides of her bathtub, trying and failing to give her voice the same sultry, softly threatening quality.

And that's when someone calls out her name from the combined kitchen and living area in the front of her apartment, and Brienne's heart nearly stops.

“Brienne? You home?”

It's just Jaime, she realizes belatedly, her next door neighbour and third best friend, but that realisation doesn't make her heart stop racing because now she's wondering if a) she forgot that they had plans and b) he heard her atrocious singing.

She emerges from the bathroom to find him with his head in her fridge, no doubt rummaging around for something to steal for his notoriously empty fridge.

“You know, if you're throwing a spontaneous party on a Saturday afternoon, you could at least have the courtesy to invite...”

He trails off as he closes the fridge and turns to look at her, and Brienne only remembers belatedly what she must look like; a bottle of window cleaner still clutched in her hand, her hair mussed and a bead of sweat running down her neck and disappearing down the front of her sports bra.

It's not that unusual for Jaime to be here, of course – he came by the first time about a week after she moved in, not to welcome her as she first assumed but to complain that the music she put on for her workout was too loud and annoyed him. And she tried to be a good neighbor and turned down the music, but he kept coming back with more and more outlandish complaints, and eventually, she gave up trying to be nice and gave back as good as she got, resigning herself to a life of feuding with her unfairly attractive and absolutely insufferable neighbour – until her best friend befriended his brother and they banded together and forced them to bury the hatchet, and somehow over time, Jaime became one of her closest friends and the guardian of her spare key.

“It's just easier to leave the key with him, who lives in the _same_ _building_ , than leaving it with me and having to travel all the way across town to pick it up from me,” Sansa had argued, and there wasn't really anything to say against that, even though she tried.

“But he's not the person I trust the most in the world. And he's _definitely_ not the one I want to have around in an actual emergency.”

“Why not? He'd be more useful than me if you had an accident or something – you know I get queasy when I see blood.”

Jaime, who to her humilitation had been standing by during this entire conversation, had nodded his head sagely at this point.

“That's true. I'm definitely better equipped to be your knight in shining armour. And if, say, you slipped and fell in the shower, I could actually lift you, if necessary.”

“You couldn't lift me either, if I was really injured.”

“Wanna bet?”, he had challenged, and Brienne had conceded her point to Sansa and given him the key before he could try and prove his claim right there at Tyrion's birthday party.

“I definitely could,” he'd said as he took the key and actually winked, and Brienne wondered if she just made a huge mistake.

But that was months ago, and to be honest, she's almost forgotten that Jaime even has the key in the first place because he uses it rather sparingly, and always after knocking first. Today, she didn't hear him knock, however, and suddenly he's standing in her living-room, still gawking at her as if she's some sort of otherworldly apparition.

“What are you doing?”

“Cleaning.”

“In your _underwear_?”

“Those are my workout clothes. I'd just finished my workout, and I figured since I was already sweaty, I might do some cleaning before I shower.”

“Right. That's..,” he sounds a little strangled now, she thinks, “very sensible of you.”

His tone is so hard to read, Brienne eventually decides the only explanation for it must be that he's mocking her. She kind of thought they'd left that behind, and it stings to find that apparently, he hasn't.

“Oh, piss off.”

“Why, what did I say?”

“You're mocking me.”

“I'm not _mocking_ you. I'm just... surprised. I've never seen you like this.”

“In my underwear? No, I should hope not.” Her face must be flaming with embarrassment, but to her great surprise, his cheeks are tinted slightly pink as well, and that is as surprising as it is satisfying. It's just enough to make her bold. “Besides, I didn't think you'd get that uptight over it.”

“I'm not _uptight_ ,” he growls and moves towards her, closing the distance between them with just a few steps, and suddenly he's standing right before her and her mouth goes dry. One moment, he was a safe enough distance away, the next he's so close he has to tilt his head back the slightest bit to look her in the eye; so close she'd only need to reach out her hand to touch him and she can feel his body heat through his clothes.

They've been close before, of course – slumped together on the sofa for a Netflix marathon, standing side by side at her cramped kitchen counter to make dinner, sitting shoulder to shoulder at the fancy work event he dragged her to, with him leaning in every once in a while to whisper pointed comments about the other guests in her ear. And sure, sometimes those moments were already enough to make her blush, to make warmth pool in her stomach and electricity seem to crackle along her skin wherever he was touching her. But it was still just low-key enough for her to remind herself that they're friends, and try to ignore the fact that she's ragingly attracted to him.

Now, that seems to have gotten a lot more difficult.

“It's just not exactly... proper attire, is it?”

“Well, I wasn't expecting visitors! It's your fault for sneaking in here in the first place.”

“Yes, I guess it is all my fault.” He's still looking at her, a slightly bemused expression on his face, and she gets the distinct impression that his mind is working furiously – she just doesn't have any idea what it's working _on_.

It's unnerving, and entirely unneccessary, in Brienne's opinion. He's acting like she committed some great crime when all she did was dance around in shorts and a sports bra, in her own apartment. Doesn't everyone do stuff like that, once in a while? And she wasn't even trying to be _sexy_ or anything, not that she'd succeed. There are yellow rubber gloves on her hands, for fuck's sake!

She's definitely getting irritated now, confused and sweaty and worst of all, self-conscious again, the way she's tried to train herself not to be for years, ever since she was an awkward teen who spent every lunch break at school ignoring the taunts of her male peers and wishing she could just disappear from sight. Now, years later, she's finally in a place where she can be above things like that, even if the memories still sting. She has a job she's good at and a small but loyal circle of friends and an apartment she lovingly decorated to her taste, and she's almost at peace with the fact that no man will ever look at her the way she used to dream someone would, with affection and admiration and _desire_ in his eyes. And sure, there are still the occasional ugly moments – rude catcalls, drunk guys in bars trying to be funny, unsubtle stares from people passing her on the street – but she's learned to ignore those.

What she can't ignore is when _Jaime_ acts like that, not anymore – he used to throw out plenty of cruel barbs about her appearance, way back when they were still feuding, but back then, he meant nothing to her, and was therefore just as easy to tune out as everyone else.

Now... now he doesn't mean _nothing_ anymore, she knows. And while she'd certainly never expect him to look at her like the unknown admirer in her foolish dreams used to, she also can't bear the fact that he'd go back to the way the rest of the world looks at her, with disgust and pity.

“If the sight bothers you so much, you can just leave and come back when I'm wearing _proper_ _attire_ ,” she snaps and storms off to the bathroom, slamming down the bottle of window cleaner she's still clutching with a little too much force and practically ripping off her rubber gloves. She's going to have her well-deserved shower now, and Jaime can go fuck himself for all she cares.

But just when she's reached that conclusion, she finds herself wrenched around by her shoulder to face him once again, and now that strange expression is gone – replaced entirely and confusingly by... anger?

“You know what?”, Jaime starts, eyes blazing, “It does bother me. But not for the ridiculous reason you're probably imagining, which, frankly, I find insulting. It bothers me because I've been dreaming about those long legs of yours for months now, preferably wrapped around my hips. Whenever you get that strain in your neck and you let me give you a massage to make it better, all I can think about is if you'd ever let me kiss that part of your neck, because it drives me crazy how much I want to. If maybe you'd allow me to keep going from there, and kiss all the rest of you too, every inch of that luminous skin, to find out if it's just as soft as it looks, or even softer in the places I can't usually see.”

He pauses for a moment, breathing hard, and Brienne wonders if she accidentally inhaled too many bathroom cleaner-fumes. Did she imagine it, or did he really just say all those things? And not just say them but follow the words with his eyes, his gaze lingering on every part of her body he mentioned with something she can only interpret as hunger?

She must have imagined it, she thinks.

But Jaime isn't finished yet.

“So yes, it bothers me to see you like this. Because you're exactly as sexy out of your clothes as you are in them, and I keep trying to tell you and you keep denying it and I'll go back to my apartment and probably jerk off thinking about you, and we'll never get anywhere for the rest of our lives.”

Randomly, Brienne remembers a conversation she had with Sansa and Margaery once, when they claimed some man at a bar was trying to hit on her, a bulky, bearded redhead almost as tall as her, and Brienne insisted they must be wrong. No one ever hits on her, or at least no one who means it. Margaery had finally given up in frustration and claimed that she wouldn't think a guy was hitting on her if he stood right before her and told her to her face that that was what he was doing.

Brienne wonders now if she was right. And then, rather uncharacteristically, she decides she's sick of always thinking and brooding and imagining. For once, she wants to allow herself to believe that things are exactly as they seem - no jeers, no roses thrown at her feet.

And it _seems_ like Jaime just told her he's attracted to her; enough for it to bother him. Enough to make _him_ imagine things, about her, even enough to make him think of her when he...-

And maybe it's all the adrenaline still rushing through her veins or maybe it's the echo of that confident girl's voice, still stuck in her head and making her think that she too can be tough and badass. Whatever it is, it makes her surge forward and kiss him, full on the lips.

She fully expects to be humiliated in mere seconds, because as soon as he realizes what's happening he'll tell her it was all a big misunderstanding and he in no way meant what she thought he meant. And when that happens, at least she'll know she got to kiss him, just once in her life.

But Jaime doesn't draw back, doesn't laugh, doesn't ask her what the hell she thinks she's doing, attacking him like that: Jaime growls and hooks his arm around her, the one with the prosthetic that still gives him trouble sometimes, and pulls her against him.

And then he's kissing her back, and if she still had any doubts that he meant what he said, what follows is a valiant effort to disperse them.

“ _Some women aren't meant for passion,”_ she remembers the words of her old nanny, who raised her after her mother's death. _"And that's alright. Because no man wants passion all his life. They'll have their big, crazy love, and once it has run its course, they'll want to settle for someone like you, someone sensible with a good heart and childbearing hips. So you'd better knock all those romantic notions out of your head and wait until someone wants to settle."_

After the Hyle debacle, she'd followed that advice, however reluctantly; had given up on waiting to be swept off her feet and gone on dates with men who might want to _settle for her_ instead, men whose interest in her had been tepid at best, and hers nonexistent.

There's nothing _tepid_ about this kiss: Jaime is all passion, his lips abandoning hers in favor of travelling down the side of her neck, his left hand running up her bare flank to skim along the edge of her sports bra and make her shiver in response, his body pressed against hers from hip to chest so that she can feel the hum of it in her ribcage when he groans against her neck.

“ _Fuck_ , Brienne...!” He pulls back a little, just enough to lean his forehead against hers. “Tell me I'm not going mad. Tell me you want this too.”

Brienne can't help but laugh at the idea that she might actually not want to do this, the sound a hoarse, stuttering breath.

“More than anything.”

This earns her another growl and a kiss that is somehow even more feverish than the one before, and then the ground drops out from under her and Brienne wonders if she actually passed out, but it turns out Jaime just manoeuvred them over to the sofa.

When she moved in and bought said sofa, she imagined she'd mostly be using it alone, sitting and watching tv after work, and while that has proven wrong since she's acquired friends to come by and sit there, she'd never imagined using it for this. But now here she is, stretched out on the dark blue cover of the sofa, and Jaime is lying on top of her with a heat in his eyes that threatens to make her melt and seep right into the upholstery.

After her lips and her neck, Jaime decides to pay attention to some other parts of her body, perhaps intending to make good on his wish to explore every inch of her skin, as he phrased it earlier, and Brienne can feel her face burn at the mere thought of it. But that heat is nothing compared to the heat pooling in her belly when he travels lower, kissing a line down her sternum, along the edge of her sports bra and further down the middle of her stomach, one of the only parts of her that are still soft because her training may be rigorous but it does not include the amount of crunches necessary to shape an actual six-pack. Jaime doesn't seem to mind, quite the contrary: He presses hot, lingering kisses to her sensitive skin that only stoke that heat inside her and turn her brain to mush until she's incapable of anything more sophisticated than a needy whimper.

“Jaime...”, she breathes, and on her skin she feels it when he sucks in a sharp breath.

He looks up, reaches out to take the hand she buried in his hair (not that she remembers doing so) to cradle it in his own and press a kiss to her palm.

“Tell me what you need,” he urges, his voice an unspoken promise that whatever she demands, he'll deliver.

“I need...” She doesn't even know, too busy comprehending what's currently happening to think about what should happen next. All she knows is that she kissed him and she wants to do it again. “You. I need you.”

With a tug on their joined hands, she pulls him closer again, until he's once more stretched out along the lengths of her body, his legs settling in between hers, his hips cradled by her hips, and his lips once again claiming hers.

It doesn't take long for them to find a rhythm, a push and pull of pressure and release that is mirrored by the movements of their hips. By the time Brienne realises what exactly it is they're mimicking, Jaime has once again pulled back and is panting harshly.

“I'm gonna need to slow down...”

Fear blossoms short and sharp inside her. _There it is_ , the mean voice whispers, _he's already regretting it_.

But that does not seem to be Jaime's problem, exactly.

“...before I embarrass myself.”

She laughs softly, and with courage fuelled by relief, suggests coyly:

“Or I could get a condom and we can continue.”

She does just that, noticing only when she gets up that he someohow tried but only partially succeeded to pull her sports bra off. She finishes the effort before following suit with her shorts and underwear, suddenly feeling uncharacteristically bold. She can feel Jaime's eyes on her as she strips, and she marvels at the way it feels to be looked at like that.

Then she dashes to get the unopened box of condoms stashed in her bathroom, (a housewarming gift from Margaery), before she can do something horrifying like burst into tears on the spot.

For something so momentous as having sex with Jaime, parts of it are surprisingly mundane: Fumbling with the condom wrapper, laughing when it won't cooperate, fumbling some more and trying to find a comfortable position on the too-narrow sofa with much shoving and giggling, but then finally, Jaime sinks into her and Brienne clasps her arms around his neck and pulls him close and thinks smugly that this too is something her body was clearly made for – something beautiful and sensual and not _frivolous_ at all.

No, this is important – because it's him, she knows, and not someone she's just settling for.

***

 

“I can't believe you keep telling everyone how boring you are.” he says later, his amused voice matching the smile on his face.

“I _am_ boring.”

“Nothing boring about what we just did.” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively, and Brienne laughs and blushes. “You can tell the rest of the world whatever you want, but I know about your wild side now.”

He sounds smugly pleased about it, and when he leans over to kiss her, she melts into him with joyful readiness.

When he draws back, there's an expression on his face that makes her heart clench with longing, and she has to force herself to act like her world hasn't just shifted on its axis.

“If this is what you consider a “wild side”, your life is much less exciting than I imagined.”

“Really? What sorts of debauchery have you been imagining, then?”

“I haven't been...” Just when she thought she couldn't blush any more. “It's none of my business what you get up to.”

There's a pause she can't interpret, long enough for her to start wondering if she said something to offend him. Then he says:

“What if I wanted it to be your business?"

“What?”

He turns on his side, props his head on his hand to look at her better.

“What if this wasn't just a one-off thing – what if we made it a regular thing?”

“Are you asking me to be... friends with benefits, or something?”

He shakes his head.

“No. Nothing that casual. I know it sounds stupid,” he checks his phone for the time, “less than two hours after I first told you that I want you. And I know I've sort of sprung all of this on you out of the blue. But we've known each other for a while now, and I want to keep being friends but I also want to keep having sex, and I'm not going to be casual about it. So I think the official way to make that happen is for you to be my girlfriend.”

Girlfriend, Brienne thinks, trying to wrap her brain around the concept, and her nanny's words resurface again, lodged too deep to just be pushed aside, to provide an awful thought.

"Jaime, are you _settling_ for me?" She blurts it out almost against her will and only notices the emotions the phrase is trailing in its wake like curls of smoke, the traces of the lifelong shame and fear of being _not enough_ as she is.

"Am I... _What_?"

"You know, because you've probably had your big crazy passionate love, and now you want to settle down with someone sensible and boring with good childbearing hips."

"Good childbearing..." He repeats her words and then breaks off again, staring as if she'd grown a second head. "Are you _going mad_ , woman?"

Well, she thinks peevishly, theres no need to act like that.

"I'm not mad. But...” She swallows thickly but holds his gaze in defiance. “I know what I am."

"What you _are_ is intelligent and kind and warm and good and, yes, beautiful. You're not someone anyone _settles_ for. You're the grand prize."

Brienne's eyelids flutter nervously, and that voice she thought she had finally vanquished speaks up again, whispering mean commentary in the back of her mind – _you must look like you have a nervous tic, on top of everything else...._

But Jaime can't hear it, and clearly, Jaime doesn't see what the voice insists is there. Jaime is still looking at her, eyes warm and face impossibly soft as he reaches out to cradle her head in his hand.

"Look, I know you haven't always had the easiest time with men. And I know you're still carrying a lot of baggage with you. But can you at least try and trust that when I tell you how I feel about you, I mean it?"

And somehow, as if he had cast some magic spell, those words make the vicious voice shut up, make her tense shoulders relax as she nods.

“I trust you.“

She may not trust herself to be able to catch, let alone keep his interest; to make him look at her like he's doing now, or – even more unimaginable – like he did earlier. To be _enough_ , for him. But Jaime believes that she is, and she trusts Jaime.

“Good. Because I feel _a lot_ about you, and I won't bother telling you all about it if you don't believe me.” His voice is harsh but his lips when he pulls her in to kiss her again are soft, searching, and she sighs against him and feels happiness flood through her, pouring through the cracks in her armour – cracks he has left there, chink by chink, over time. It rushes once through her heart, thrums along with the blood pumping through her veins, and then gathers somewhere in her middle to curl up comfortably, content to stay.

"And as for your childbearing hips,” Jaime pulls away to say, and Brienne winces in embarrassment at being reminded of that stupid phrase she quoted at him earlier, “believe me, the only thing to do with children that you make me think of is the act of conceiving them."

He smiles languidly as he says it, his hips tilting forward to let her know just what thinking of that act does to him, and Brienne, lighter and brighter than she has ever felt, laughs against his lips and bucks back against him, watching his eyes slide half-shut on a groan as their hips meet.

“Really? I think you might need to show me what exactly you're thinking of there...”

Jaime cuts her off with a harsh kiss and a hand already roaming along her body, and the last thing she sees before her eyes close in bliss is the ever-so-slightly dangerous flash in his eyes.

He can never resist a challenge.

 


End file.
